Recovering the Earliest English Language in Scotland

this project uses place-names to investigate the Northumbrian dialect of Old English and its development into Older Scots. Our focus is the historical county of Berwickshire in south-east Scotland, which has some of Scotland’s earliest recorded place-names. Over the course of three years (2016-2018), we shall collect and analyse all place-names in six parishes along the Anglo-Scottish border, publishing the results as a printed volume within the Survey of Scottish Place-Names. We shall also collect and analyse all major settlement, hill and river names throughout the county, making the results freely available as a searchable web resource. Finally, the Old English and Older Scots strata within both sets of results will be used as the basis from which to reconstruct the linguistic features of the earliest English/Scots language in Scotland.